DPC. The distributed personal computer

Abstract

Nowadays people have many different personal devices, like laptops and tablets, that they use to access and process data. Very often it is desirable to access and process the same data on different devices without having to copy it from one device to another. Commercial cloud services provide good services for achieving this, but recent events, such as the Snowdon disclosures, have illustrated some of the trust issues of using external services.

This project introduces the Distributed Personal Computer (DPC), which aims to give a single system view of the user's personal devices without the use of external services. The DPC is meant to be for a single user with multiple devices. A prototype has been designed and implemented, and experiments have been conducted to evaluate the prototype.

The implemented prototype, and the experiments conducted on it, show that the concept of the DPC is worth pursuing further. The experiments show that the operation overhead is small enough to allow several hundred operations to run per second, and that the architecture and prototype for the DPC appears to be good enough for personal use.